In 2005, former president Jimmy Carter--perhaps the greatest and most moral former president we've ever had--wrote a book entitled Our Endangered Values: America's Moral Crisis.
These are just three of the many people who have pointed out that our values are skewed--that we need to reevaluate those things that seem important to us and readjust our values.
Our recent economic difficulties should make such a reevaluation even more urgent. What are the things of ultimate importance in our lives? What should be the relative value of the people in our lives and the things we possess? What can--and should--we value less, or perhaps even do without? What should we hold most dear?
Let's look back at some of the older values of our nation--values like thrift and saving and sharing--to see if they might help us live lives of true value rather than lives of consumption, waste and greed. It would be good for us--and better for our planet as well.
We develop our value system by building on the values of our parents. We add our religous training and our education. In 1999, Robert Fulgrum wrote All I Really Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. It has since come out in a revised and expanded 15th anniversary edition. We learn many basic values in kindergarten-- and in elementary school, high school and college. We continue learning on the job and in our families. I wonder if I ever understood unselfish love until I had children, and now a grandchild, of my own.
We learn as the values we've adopted come in conflict with the values of other people and as reality causes us to question some of the values we've been taught in the past.
As we mature, we consolidate and pass on those values, always with the humility to realize that we probably still don't have it right. Yet we must do what we can to rearrange the price tags our world keeps switching, to rediscover precious values we've left behind and to preserve and protect those that are endangered. That's one way we can be of value to our world. |
